When the client application is started a log in window appears. This allows the user to enter his/hers username and password in addition to the address and port of the server to be accessed. The user name and password must be entered, however, the client application will fill in some (hopefully appropriate) values for the ip address and port number of the server to be used. These defaults should be stored in the file settings in the prefs directory which should either be stored in the same directory as the application (or rather where it is run from) or in the directory pointed to by the $CLIENT_DIR environment variable (this however is for the administrator to handle so the user shouldn't have to worry about it). the application will use a set of default parameters for these choices. Currently the application requires that you enter the numerical ip address of the server as the program doesn't perform any name lookup (since I don't have that many named servers).
After the login you will be greeted with the main window of the application. If the login was successful this window will initialise by obtaining information about the available data from the database. If you were not succesful in logging in this will be obvious as there will be no entries available in the database table selector (see Main Window for details).
